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Witless Wonder Woman

The movie Wonder Woman has been marketed as a step forward for society, a sign of progress. I saw the movie tonight, and what I watched was nothing of the sort.

It would be kind to say that Wonder Woman is a load of nonsense. In fact, it’s something much more sinister than that. Wonder Woman practices outrageous historical revisionism that celebrates violence and a culture of war while pretending to value peace and love.

Wonder Woman is introduced as a young girl who hates going to school to learn about things, and really just wants to be trained to use deadly weapons to hurt and kill people. She belongs to a group of semi-magical people who exist only to fight. She is raised to equate violence with strength, and to revere the most prized artifact of her people, a tool for killing.

Wonder Woman approves of the killing of a bunch of people on a beach, but then reacts in horror when she goes to Europe to see World War I. She just can’t imagine why people are killing each other so much, she says. It must be the fault of Ares, the god of war.

So, Wonder Woman sets out on a mission to kill the god of war… because it’s the only way to stop all the killing.

Wonder Woman kills huge numbers of people as a part of this quest, joining up with a band of warriors who shoot, beat, and bomb. They’re doing this, they say, because they hate the killing that war brings. If they don’t kill lots of people, they argue, many people could die. They hate war, and that’s why they have to fight the war and win it, they say.

In the real World War I, the British and Americans were using large amounts of chemical weapons. More German soldierss died of chemical weapons attacks than British soldiers.

In the revisionist fantasy of World War I depicted by Wonder Woman, it’s only the Germans who used chemical weapons, which was why it was okay for Wonder Woman to kill lots of Germans, to save lives.

The first we see of Ares, the god of war, he’s trying to convince people to support a peace agreement, though we’re supposed to believe that he is trying to spread war as far as he can as fast as he can. Then, Ares helps Wonder Woman and her crew of righteous killers to make their way to stop his evil chemical weapons plan.

Finally, the climax comes, in which Wonder Woman says that she won’t just go around killing people, which is actually what she’s been doing for almost the entire movie. To make her point, she kills Ares, while saying, “I believe in love.”

This isn’t what progress looks like. Wonder Woman is nothing more than classic pro-war propaganda.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.